David Sanger asks:
That has led to questions that Mr. Bush and his aides have still not answered. Why did Mr. Bush's aides keep coming back to the Africa case as "an emblematic example" of Mr. Hussein's surreptitious activities, as one administration official terms it, if so many in the intelligence world were questioning it?
Further, how did it survive so many drafts of the State of the Union speech in January, only to be thrown out, days later, by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, who found the evidence so thin that he dared not take it to the United Nations for his own presentation?
The answer: Two words. Dick Cheney.